Ploys

A ploy is a desperate course of action you can take which may alter the situation to your advantage, but will cost you.

Trollbabe has several ploylike things (not by that name) available to the player: An Unexpected Ally, A Remembered Spell, etc. These are not true ploys, however, because they are more like “fortunate coincidences” than “risky things the character tries”. They are ploylike in effect but not in content.

Examples of ploys:

A Dangerous Shortcut.
An Untrusted Ally.
A Desperate Leap.
A Wild Burst of Firing.
A Last-Ditch Defence.

Instead of bonus and penalty dice, you get “risk dice” in a given situation. These are dice of a different colour which cancel out your dice if they show the same value. So if you roll three risk dice vs your five skill dice, and the risk dice come up 1 3 6 and the skill dice 1 2 2 4 6, you lose the 1 and the 6.

Now, depending on other circumstances, some of these numbers are successes and some are failures, so risk dice can remove failures as well as successes (let’s say 1 is a failure here and 6 is a success for our example). The cool thing is that (in the game I am envisioning) the numbers for success and failure shift according to your fatigue and injury levels, so if you are in a state where you would normally expect to succeed, risk dice hinder that, but if you are in a state where you would expect to have a high chance of failure, more risk means you are actually more likely to pull it off. (This isn’t “realistic” but is reflective of a particular kind of story, which is the kind of story I have in mind.)

In the example, the 3 is left over from the risk dice, and that means you take a hit to your fatigue, which in turn changes what is a success for the next round. (Perhaps odds hit fatigue and evens hit injury, or something.)

Opposition is a special case of risk dice; by exercising a skill against your opponent, you are creating the risk that your opponent will fail.

When you invoke a ploy, two things happen:

1. You nominate a skill you are using to create extra risk against your opposition (the opposition may be a non-personal challenge or a person attempting something). The opposition gets as many risk dice as you have levels in that skill to weigh against what they are attempting. 2. You also nominate something you care about to receive the same number of risk dice, against an appropriate skill you are using to try to protect it.

So, for example, you have the skill “Local Area Knowledge” at 5, and invoke the ploy “Secret Shortcut”, meaning that you can add 5 risk dice against your opponent’s attempt to escape you. However, you put your horse at risk because you’re riding down this steep, narrow path to try to cut the bandits off. You roll 5 risk dice against your horseriding skill, and if you end up with more failures than successes, your horse breaks its leg.